So, five months into 2010 what have we learned? I am bad at updating the blog this year as well. I’m sorry blog, Twitter is just so much easier! Here is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while. The Travels in a Mathematical World podcast is on hiatus and I wanted to…
Shape of the cosmos
I have been neglecting this blog a lot recently and have just realised I never posted the video of my latest History of maths and x talk, “Shape of the cosmos”, here. This aims to offer mathematical histories for various topics, x. The idea is that each topic is covered in a talk at the…
Advice on running a lottery
I am just flicking through a book on the history of probability and have come across reference to some writing on lotteries in A Treatise of Taxes & Contributions by William Petty (1662) which I thought I would share here: Now in the way of Lottery men do also tax themselves in the general, though…
What do mathematicians do?
I wrote a guest blog post for the Careers Group, University of London, entitled “What do mathematicians do?“, in which I talk about giving my careers talk for the IMA and what I tell students about careers options for mathematics graduates and being a professional. Read this blog post: What do mathematicians do?.
TEXTp lives!
Following my previous post, “ASCII Me“, the TEXTp ‘feature’ is no longer available after April Fools Day, so here is a video of what it looked like.
ASCII Art Me
YouTube have introduced a text-only mode for April Fool’s Day – TEXTp. If you view a video, where the choice of quality – 360p, 480p, etc. – is, you can choose TEXTp. Here is what I look like in ASCII characters giving my cryptography talk (click to enlarge): Here is a link to my video…
Podcast: Episode 57 – History of Maths and x, Shape of the cosmos: Developments from Newton to Einstein
These are the show notes for episode 57 of the Travels in a Mathematical World Podcast. 57 is the so-called Grothendieck prime. The story goes that brilliant mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck was asked to name a prime number and gave 57, which is, of course, not prime. This story is used to illustrate how some mathematicians…